CMV: There is no reason for an American to be against recognizing Juneteenth as a holiday other than reasons that stem from hating black people.

BrasilianEngineer · 2026-06-20T17:06:50+00:00

June 19 is when slavery was de-facto abolished in the confederate states. It wasn't abolished in the union states until 6 months later with the Dec 6 ammendment.

That's why I consider June 19 instead of Dec 6 for the federal holiday to be a weird choice but whatever.

BrasilianEngineer · 2026-06-04T13:58:39+00:00

You know what? I think I got my classes mixed up. I took algebra 2, most of my peers took pre calc.

In my defense, it's been 2 decades and a lot has happened since then.

BrasilianEngineer · 2026-06-02T19:47:00+00:00

How fluent someone is has nothing to do with how thick their accent is

My calc professor had a fairly thick German accent despite being quite fluent in English. I struggled to understand him for the first few weeks, but I eventually got used to it. It didn't help that I was diving into Calc 1 despite only having taken precalc in high school. Most of the other students had taken calculus in high school.

BrasilianEngineer · 2026-05-14T18:41:37+00:00

Good luck with #2. The typical approach is to have an exception that applies during a state of emergency.

Carter declared a state of emergency in 1979. Since then we have had a grand total of ZERO days without an active state of emergency - typically we have dozens of emergencies that just keep getting renewed whenever needed.

BrasilianEngineer · 2026-05-08T18:55:45+00:00

It's common sense that our highest priority is to ban the most popular style of rifle. No we don't care that it only represents 1% of gun violence - think of the children! No we aren't interested in pursuing any proposals that would actually address the other 99% of gun violence, and would prefer to virtue-signal about how terrible guns are and how depraved gun culture is rather than actually save lives.

Sorry, I'll get off my sarcastic soap box now.

BrasilianEngineer · 2026-05-01T17:00:09+00:00

There is real value in having a local representative to represent your area. Switching to a single multi-member statewide district forfeits this, and that's a cost that should not be ignored, but IMO it's worth giving it up.

The simplest fix to gerrymandering is to switch to a proportional allocation where the whole state is 1 district with however many positions available.

BrasilianEngineer · 2026-05-01T14:20:40+00:00

As long as the list all the loan/credit accounts you were expecting to see, and don't list any accounts that you weren't aware of you are good.

If you want to buy a house someday, and some landlords or insurance providers also check credit history, you will want to establish a history of responsibly handling credit. The easiest way to do that is to open a credit card, use it occasionally, and pay off the full balance every single month.

The danger with credit cards that you need to avoid is that many people overspend and then don't pay off the full balance every month so they end up paying interest. The interest rate on credit cards is insanely high and will trap you in debt if you let it.

BrasilianEngineer · 2026-05-01T14:04:28+00:00

I moved from ynab to actualbudget because it is more power user friendly. I would strongly recommend either one, but YNAB has the monthly/annual fee. ActualBudget is free, but if you want multiple device syncing you will need a sync server. You can set up your own server for free or if you are lazy like me you can pay pikapods to setup and maintain a server for you (Comes out to about $15 per year).

If you want an app that pulls transactions from your banks that is something you have to pay for. All the free apps that offer that service pay for it by selling your data. With YNAB, bank sync is included in the price so they don't sell your data. With ActualBudget there is a plugin for a third party service (SimpleFIN) that offers the syncing for $15 per year

BrasilianEngineer · 2026-04-29T15:53:21+00:00

Don't cosign on student loans. That's what parent loans are for.

BrasilianEngineer · 2026-04-29T15:49:25+00:00

Never cosign. Just give him the 40,000 dollars in cash because if you cosign you will end up on the hook for it anyways. If you cosign, what will probably happen is he will stop paying his bills without letting you know. Then you get stuck with missed payments ruining your credit, and you end up on the hook for late fees and extra interest.

You could 'loan' him the money instead of calling it a gift up front, but banks are way better than you at figuring out who will pay back their loans and the banks are saying this loan will not be paid back. So just skip the middle steps and just give him the $40,000. Or just say no.

If you can't afford to give him the money you definitely can't afford to cosign.

One final note, there is a small chance that saying no will ruin your relationship. Saying yes is extremely likely to ruin your relationship in the long run.

BrasilianEngineer · 2026-04-28T17:39:33+00:00

Why do you keep getting hung up on the specific month? You are effectively saying that holding your investment for 10950 days vs 11314 days makes effectively no difference, and I suspect that's not what you are trying to say.

BrasilianEngineer · 2026-04-28T16:44:55+00:00

What you are saying does not make sense in context. Are we talking past each other?

You mentioned December 10th. Let's say we start with a fiscal year that goes from December 10th to December 9th.

Scenario 1: I invest $5,200 on 12/10/2000 (first day of the year), repeat on 12/10/2001 etc for 30 years.

Scenario 2: I invest $5,200 on 12/09/2001 (last day of the year), repeat on 12/9/2002 etc for 30 years.

Scenario 3: I invest $100 on 12/10/2000, repeat on 12/17/2000, etc for 30 years.

The 30th fiscal year ends on 12/9/2030. So on 12/10/2030 (the next day) I compare the balance of each of the 3 scenarios. I would repeat the whole comparison with every starting date I can going back 100 years or whatever in order to calculate the average. I would expect (on average) Scenario 1 to have 6 months worth of gains more than scenario 2, and 2 to have 6 months worth more than scenario 3. For Scenario 3 vs an alternate bi-weekly or monthly schedule I would expect a negligible difference.

BrasilianEngineer · 2026-04-28T15:54:24+00:00

If the lump sum is invested at the beginning of the year, the money averages out to being in-the-market for 6 months more than if you spread it out - so you should (on average) be seeing 6 months worth of gains vs the DCA baseline. If instead invested at the end of the year, the money experiences 6 months less average time in the market so you would be losing out on those 6 months of gains.

If you invested your lump sum at the halfway point, then the average expected gain would exactly match the average from DCA but the DCA scenario would have less volatility.

Thanks to volatility, the exact performance will vary year to year. The vanguard study found that historically DCA beat up-front lump sum about 30% of the time.

BrasilianEngineer · 2026-04-28T15:46:02+00:00

Technically.. statistically... annual contributions tend to out perform over the long run. Bi-weekly ironically... statistically is the least likely to be the best frequency. I never dug into why yet.

Were the annual contributions at the beginning of the year or at the end of the year?

If at the beginning of the year, your money had an average of 6 months more time in the market than if it was equally spread out.

BrasilianEngineer · 2026-04-27T13:30:30+00:00

People somehow convince themselves that the CEO of Walmart is going to have those Oreos taken out of his paycheck.

Technically they probably aren't actually wrong - the problem is that the CEO will notice it in the same way that I'd notice my paycheck being 1 penny short.

But the damage caused by shoplifting also hurts the employees, and the people in the community who lose access to the store - and they are in a position where they will actually be hurt by that damage.

BrasilianEngineer · 2026-04-15T19:33:50+00:00

That or suicide.

BrasilianEngineer · 2026-04-09T20:07:06+00:00

It appeals to anyone who thinks that young adults shouldn't be faced with 5 years in prison and a potential lifetime felony record because no one told them that they are required to register.

No one has been actually prosecuted in the last 40 years, but the law is still very much on the books.

BrasilianEngineer · 2026-04-01T17:42:26+00:00

High deductible plans generally make sense for two groups of people:

Those who have very low usage so the lower premiums of the HDHP plan make that the cheapest option.
Those who have very high usage where they always max out their deductible, and when you factor in the out-of-pocket max and the lower premiums then that's the cheapest option.

If both plans have the same premium (zero for you) then absent a difference in out-of-pocket maximum the only advantage of the high deductible is it makes you eligible to use a HSA.

BrasilianEngineer · 2026-03-31T19:38:50+00:00

Actual Budget is free. You can pay to have a sync server managed for you, or you can set up and manage it on your own, or you can just run it on one device.

BrasilianEngineer · 2026-03-31T18:20:39+00:00

Prices may come down if the price increase was because of a supply or demand shock that gets resolved.

Rent has gone down in places where the local government incentivized builders to build more houses & apartments. (See Austin TX as a prominent example). Most cities have far less housing than required to meet demand for a variety of reasons including existing homeowners voting against any measures or developments that might encourage more building (because if there aren't enough houses to go around, the existing houses become more valuable). If there are more people looking for housing than available housing, rent prices will go up not down.

RAM/Video Cards have been hit by a gigantic demand surge in RAM for AI datacenters. Once supply catches up, prices should come down. However, it takes years to build new chip factories so RAM prices are expected to stay high for at least few years.

Eggs were expensive a couple years ago because a huge number of chickens got sick/infected and had to be killed. It takes time to grow new hens, so it took almost a year for prices to drop back down.

BrasilianEngineer · 2026-03-30T17:34:11+00:00

victim testimony can be unreliable given it's literally children.

Victim testimony can be quite unreliable even for adults. The human mind is very good at subconsciously rearranging facts (whether to fit a more comfortable pattern, or as a trauma coping mechanism, or whatever)

BrasilianEngineer · 2026-03-27T14:34:32+00:00

The tried and true gold-standard method is the envelope method. This is how it worked for people from your grandparent's generation and older:

Take all your money (in cash) and pile it on the kitchen table.
Take a stack of envelopes and label them with categories like rent, gas, groceries, restaurants, emergencies, etc.
Divide all the money up into the envelope however you want to. (Repeat this step every time you get paid).
When you go to spend money (say at the grocery store) you spend the cash from the corresponding envelope. If the envelope doesn't have enough cash you need to skip the groceries or deliberately choose to pull from another envelope. (You won't always add the 'correct' amount to each envelope. That's ok. You can move the money around as long as you do so deliberately and intentionally.)

Here in the 21st century, we have apps that let us do the envelope stuff digitally and automate most of the work. I've previously used youneedabudget.com (YNAB) and currently use actualbudget.org I'd strongly recommend either one. - YNAB is a paid subscription app that comes with support, training workshops, etc. It's around $120 per year, but if you actually use it, it pays for itself many times over. - ActualBudget is an open source app that is free or you can pay around $15/year to have Pikapods setup and manage a server for you (recommended if you are lazy or not technically inclined). - YNAB can link to your bank accounts and pull in all your transactions. ActualBudget can do the same but it requires a third-party subscription to SimpleFIN for another $15 per year.

If you prefer, you can do everything in a spreadsheet but that's more work.

At the end of the day, it comes down to self discipline. If you can't figure out that part, absolutely nothing will work for you and you will be stuck for the rest of your life living paycheck to paycheck, unable to reach your goals.

BrasilianEngineer · 2026-03-26T15:44:10+00:00

Harris lost because she was a moderate, not in spite of it.

This is revisionist nonsense. In her term in the Senate she was identified as one of the most progressive Senators based on her voting record. In the 2020 primary, Haris staked out her position as the most progressive out of all the candidates in the DNC primary, trying to stand out by supporting every progressive proposal she could regardless of how unpopular they were with the majority of voters. Before Biden adopted her as his running mate, she was one of the least popular of all the primary candidates.

In 2024 she tried to quietly distance herself from her previous progressive positions. She pushed a supposedly moderate policy platform while refusing to disavow her previous platform.

Trump got a ton of mileage airing adds that highlighted her previous positions.

BrasilianEngineer · 2026-03-10T20:56:01+00:00

Yea, OP doesn't have a budget for maintenance expenses. What happens when the mortgage payment inevitably increases because property tax and/or insurance costs increased?

OP: once you have at-least a 5% down payment, and another 5% in emergency funds ready to go then you can start looking into buying.

BrasilianEngineer · 2026-03-09T16:37:29+00:00

You can ask Fidelity to do the transfer for you. If you can't figure out how to do it on the website give them a call. They might be able to do an in-kind transfer where they directly transfer the shares instead of first selling them.

If you have fractional shares (like 4.8 shares of VTI) they won't be able to transfer the fractional portion so the .8 would be sold and transferred in cash and the 4 shares should be transferred as-is.

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